Alice's Promise
by RapunzelInTheSnow
Summary: The White Queen made a promise with Alice... Slight madness, slight Hatter x Alice. Don't like, don't read. No flames please.
1. Chapter 1

A girl was tapping a rhythm on the glass.

"You see, Alice is going to come back. She promised. She doubly promised." She giggled half-heartedly. Her own reflection stared back at her.

"Red will forgive Alice. Alice and White and Red will be friends. Forever and ever, and White can fall asleep again. Forever and ever. Queens together, and forever." The rhythm stopped as she frowned, thinking.

She tapped against the glass. "Come on! You let Alice through, let me through! Let me through! LET WHITE THROUGH!"

She stopped. "Mustn't be ill behaved. Must be a good queen. Then Alice will come back. Because…"

A small smile curved the pale lips upwards. "She doubly, doubly, quadruples promised." The girl had white skin that was ever so slightly flushed from her mini tantrum, but framed by the curly white hair. Leaning her forehead against the glass she resumed talking to herself.

"And Hatter will be happy." She considered this. Hatter was very definitely unhappy. He wanted Alice to come back, certainly.

"But what will Heart think?" She said worriedly to her own pale reflection, patting her cheek. "Heart doesn't like Alice."

Heart didn't like Alice anymore. White knew that. She tipped her head to one side sadly. "But Heart, Alice doubly promised!" Tears started to drip down her face as she mumbled.

Hatter raced towards her. "Oh, my Queen!" He sighed. The mad little Queen tugged at his heartstrings. They were all mad, even Hatter himself, he thought, but the Queen was harmless for the most part.

"It won't let me through." White turned a pale tear streaked face to Hatter.

"Maybe if you don't hit it, it will feel more positively inclined towards you." Hatter reached his long arms out and picked her up. She fell asleep immediately and he turned to the mirror.

His Alice was through there. He could feel it, almost see her curling tawny hair, and those beautiful blue eyes. He knew that the White Queen needed Alice to come back because then the world would make more sense to her. Alice had promised her; ergo Alice needed to come back. It would fulfil the timeline the little Queen had created in her head.

He let out another heavy sigh, patting the pale locks of his Queen. Both of them clung together like driftwood, and if the truth were to be told he cared for her like he might his own child.

"Alice, we need you here. I need you." He spoke to the mirror, turning away when there was no reply.


	2. Chapter 2

"So Miss Liddell. Your nightmares have been coming back." The doctor's voice, smooth as snakeskin, glided through the air to poison Alice's ear.

She gritted her teeth slightly. "That's correct."

He tutted, as though she were a little child who had done something wrong. "Oh, that is not what I wanted to hear. Not at all what I wanted to hear."

She snarled inwardly, but kept her composure as any other young lady of eighteen might. "I apologise if I have inconvenienced you in any way, doctor."

"I think it might be for the best if you took these."

He held out a small jar but Alice waved it away.

"Don't bother. Other doctors gave them to me. They just prolong the dreadful experience." She pressed a delicate hand to her temple and the doctor glared at her slightly before leaving.

Wonderland. A place where she was sure she had been, because she knew all the people there. Glancing to the mirror, she saw a slight shadow in it, prickling at her infamous curiosity. She went up to the mirror and placed her hands upon it childishly.

She recoiled instantly, at the faint feeling that she would slip through…

Again.

Quivering in fear, she watched as the shadow recoiled, and then pressed itself against the glass. Oh no. She'd finally gone mad.

Because there was the palest little girl, shouting and sobbing, tears running down her cheeks, even though Alice couldn't hear a sound. A crown nestled lovingly in the pale locks as the girl slammed her palms repeatedly into the mirror, and Alice hazily identified her as the White Queen, one of the people from her Nightmares.

She hesitantly put a hand to the mirror, hoping it might sooth the illusion, who seemed to be calming down. She took one hand away to try and beckon Alice, who shook her head. This seemed to send the girl into hysterics, when another figure appeared, shadowy, but giving Alice a most peculiar feeling of heartbreak. The girl slowly stepped away from the mirror, and Alice was left looking like a fool.

Clutching her head, she stumbled away, eyes widening in horror. Her heart hurt more than it should. Were her nightmares finally crossing the border to pursue her as much as they did at night? She collapsed onto the chair as her knees failed her, tears rolling down her cheeks, a cheerful voice echoing in her head, pieced together from a child's memory. The voice of the Hatter.

She shook her head, concentrating on the White Queen who had trustingly fallen asleep in her lap when they were just children. By the looks of things, the Queen still was. Maybe you didn't age in Wonderland?

She ached to look at the mirror, but a primal fear of some sort held her back, pleading with her not to.

She could have sworn she heard a stifled sob, and quiet, surreptitious tapping, but turned her head away.

It stopped.


	3. Chapter 3

Hatter stopped tapping upon the glass, seeing the tears that glistened in his beloved's eyes, before backing away from the mirror, very slowly.

He didn't want to leave Alice all alone, but he couldn't exactly harass her via a mirror; it wasn't exactly something one did to the person one was in love with.

He felt that he needed to tell her that he loved her, but he knew that taking care of the little queen was more important at this moment. Even if he knew himself to be completely insane, the queens could be more so, aside from the cruelly sane Queen of Hearts who hated Alice from the very bottom of her dark and dreary heart. Red often manipulated people to try and keep them close, but White was so fragile that he sometimes felt that her sisters' tempers had broken her in some way.

White sobbed into his jacket. "She's grown up! She grew up, Hatter!" Tears fell onto his waistcoat and he folded his limbs so he could sit down and hug the crying little girl.

"Only recently. Anyway, you know that they do over there. It's just something that happens with time." He patted the pale little cheek to try and calm her down. She stopped crying and looked up at him.

"But I can't sleep without her, and she promised she'd come back!" The little girl buried her face back into his jacket. It made his heart break. Didn't White think that it might hurt him, break him even if Alice were to die, if the love of his life were to fade from that world? He knew it would cripple him, and a tear rolled down his cheek.

"What's this?" A mocking voice interrupted them and they turned around to see the Red Queen. "White's not behaving and Hatter's crying?" The Red Queen stood there, and her sister immediately hid behind Hatter.

Tossing crimson curls, Red laughed. "What can have happened to make you so pathetically miserable, White?" She stepped forward, carmine skirts rustling and hopped quickly to catch White's face between her palms.

"Is it the mirror? Seven told me that it wouldn't let you through. But did you perhaps see her?" Her eyes twinkled merrily at her sister's unhappiness. "What had happened?"

Hatter removed Red's hands and stepped between the two. "Leave your sister alone." His voice trembled slightly and Red's eyes twinkled a little more.

"Could it be she's aged?" The look of shock in their eyes told her that she'd managed to land upon the truth. She grinned wickedly.

"She has! Your precious Alice has aged!" She danced around laughing, while Hatter tried to reign in his anger. He couldn't show his anger to White, and while he could get away with taking Red's hands from White's face he couldn't get away with attacking the Red Queen.

White began to sob and he wrapped an arm around her, hoping to quiet her.


	4. Chapter 4

Red danced around laughing at her sister. She always had been unnecessarily devoted to Alice, and this was perfect. Alice might be gone in just a few years, perhaps even within this century. And it also amused her to see the Hatter trying to contain his anger. It was a lovely feeling provoking the two of them.

She stepped closer to Hatter. "You'll drive her mad if you appear, you know," she said confidently. "She's forgotten. She thinks you're just a dream. You'll have to watch her get married and grow old and _die_."

He trembled with rage but appeared to keep his temper. "We'll be going back now, my Queen." He turned away from her and anger flashed through her mind.

"What if I ordered you to stay?" She asked it nicely enough but her panic and rage made her voice quiver on the last word.

The man growled in annoyance, stepping away from her as she stepped towards them, making it look like a strange parody of a waltz. "You'd have to employ an ambassador for that. The White Queen is just as royal as you are, and holds the same amount of authority…as you are well aware."

White nodded slowly, and they continued to walk away from her. She dashed towards them. "Wait! You can't leave me here in neutral country!"

Hatter stopped, as this was true. She could almost see him thinking the words, and smirked in triumph.

"And Queens have to stick together," she said, well aware that this would provoke a reaction in her sister "which Alice seems to have forgotten but that doesn't matter."

Her sister began to cry and Red watched the tears fall with considerable interest, before Hatter turned around to glare at her.

"You forgot that rule when you started a war with the Queen of Diamonds, and forgot it again when you started another with the Queen of Hearts. Don't you even _dare _badmouth Alice, you…" He trailed off, aware that he couldn't insult a Queen, even if he was the White Queen's protector. Red shot him a scornful look and he turned his attention back to White, making sure she was okay, busying himself with that task as a method of ignoring Red.

She watched her sister's look of worry and caught her glances, grinning in the smuggest way she could manage whenever White looked towards her. She knew that she had ignored the rule of Queens sticking together when she started the battles, but she didn't exactly care. She wanted to end White's devotion to Alice. She hadn't forgotten the way Alice had scolded her right before she left, and hated the way that the Wonderlanders had looked down on her afterwards. She was a _Queen. _Her subjects weren't following her as strongly after Alice had done that.

She would never ever forgive her.


	5. Chapter 5

Alice had stayed in her room faking a headache for a couple of days, and her parents had been happy enough to accept this. Honestly though, she hated doubting herself, which was what the Queen had unwittingly made her do.

Surely someone aged over time? And yet the Queen hadn't appeared to, which was strange, to say the least. Wonderland had been an age ago, when you weren't given pills by poisonous doctors and when your family didn't try and get you to marry strange men.

For she had been introduced to many over the past year, her mother with a hopeful expression each time, and Alice with a bored one. She didn't wish to marry, she wished to write, but of course that wasn't a respectable profession in the eyes of her parents. It might have been better if her sister wasn't so _married._

Her sister was already pregnant with her second child, for crying out loud. Alice had tried adoring her niece, but eventually she had resigned herself to the fact she might have to wait a while before she could like the child. Even her affection for her sister had lessened after she found out that the other was suggesting suitable matches for her and talking about her to all the single men that she knew.

Now if that didn't say 'my sister is a desperate hermit' she didn't know what did.

She glanced towards her hand mirror, and saw a shadowy reflection in the surface and screamed. Dropping the glass, she saw it shatter sending shards across the thick carpet, bringing her back to reality.

Her parents knocked on the door, and she fell back on a chair weakly.

"What's wrong? Alice?" Her mother sounded too worried and Alice closed her eyes in desperation. Her mother might call the doctors once more and Alice didn't feel up to another one of those snakes invading her privacy again.


	6. Chapter 6

Everything in this castle seemed to be white. The armour in the halls, the tunics of the knights, the halls themselves, the doors, the corridors. Red glared and tapped her foot, wishing she could crack these stupid marble tiles.

"Welcome, sister," the little Queen said finally, bowing low and then curtsying. A flicker of annoyance passed over the Red Queen's face at hearing her sister's soft tones. Of course, White was at her home here, and they couldn't exactly get along, which meant at some point she would have to leave. She'd be glad to leave, but it would mean that she couldn't tease White as much. And that was fun, White didn't have any resistance to her teasing and would cry, those pretty pale cheeks drowned in clear tears. White's tears weren't salt water, but pure water, and it was quite amazing to see. Red had always been fascinated by them ever since they had first become aware.

It also meant, recently, that Hatter would stand up for White, acting like a knight even though he was just himself. Those eyes would glint with hatred and Red thought that was very amusing to watch.

She turned her attention back to White. "Oh, and very welcome you make me without a single splash of colour here aside from the Hatter and myself. One would almost find it upsetting, if I did not know that it wasn't deliberate." She looked for a long while at her sister, until the other began to become tearful and she walked past, sighing.

"Was it deliberate, White?" she asked, and the little Queen burst into those pure tears, which Red watched with delight. Hatter's expression was stormy as he comforted the little Queen, telling her how Red was just a menacing person who liked to make her cry. White sobbed never the less, and Red smirked in victory as she headed out to the garden. Here there was green grass and white roses – Heart would have had a fit – and several people dressed in various shades of white swanning about on a marble platform with delicate white taples and chairs, ornate in their design. Most held roses, and one child held a bunch of daisies as he crafted them into a daisy chain. His hands were rather grubby, and Red felt a scowl creep onto her face in distaste.

These flowers had hardly any colour save wretched white, but at least the deep rich green of their leaves was something. It was better than the castle, in which you were virtually drowning in shades of ivory and cream, and if you looked at the brighter shades of white, your eyes hurt, screaming for a nice scarlet colour. Even these people's complexions were too pale to go near a light pink in the cheeks.


End file.
